Case Study

LaSer UK needed to update its cloud POS Credit Management system for its global account base, and implemented TimeShiftX to test the software application life cycle of credit products. TimeShiftX provided time travel to enable LaSer UK to validate all business cases before the “Go Live” date, while preserving their Active Directory environment.

LaSer UK is a provider of consumer and partner finance programs, operating in the UK and Republic of Ireland. LaSer UK provides the leading retail finance, credit cards, affinity loans and loyalty programs for over 4 million customers and business partners across multiple sectors – including retail, household, insurance, entertainment and leisure.

Business Needs

LaSer UK provides a web-based cloud credit management system utilized on POS devices throughout their customer and partner locations. Their current system was undergoing an update. In this iteration, the system added new functionality to manage the entire credit life cycle with a streamlined new interface. This new system is a web-based, distributed software application hosted in their data center running on a mixed infrastructure.

When a customer signs up for a credit cards, line of credit, or other financial products, this Credit Management system allows the business to manage various functionality in the credit life cycle such as

Credit agreements

Accrued Interest

Financial calculations

Risk Assessment

Interest Rates

Billing

Credit Reporting

Payment Management

The environment is contained within Active Directory and the application leverages webservers, database servers, and custom code. The high volume of date logic paired with Active Directory blocking manual testing made the LaSer UK team look for a complete solution to enable time travel while not compromising their Active Directory security policies.

Solution

The LaSer UK development team was working to meet their upcoming “Go Live” release date and needed a time shifting software solution that was quick to deploy and easy to use. After a brief trial, the team decided TimeShiftX was the best solution given its ease of integration, intuitive use, and Active Directory compatibility.

In this project, their upgraded credit management system included new functionality to manage the entire credit life cycle. This increased the business cases anchored in date logic as items such as interest rates, billings, financial calculations had to dynamically adjust to new terms. TimeShiftX allowed the LaSer UK team to time travel within their environment and run thorough date simulations to validate code. This new time shift testing capacity increased system reliability as every business rule was fully validated and tested.

Benefit

TimeShiftX enabled time travel across the entire web-based, distributed cloud application with a “plug-in-play” ease. In addition, TimeShiftX allowed the team to maintain their Active Directory security, per their company’s policies, and date shift to any point. LaSer UK was able to time travel their full application stack and run through the complete credit application life cycle for every customer profile and scenario.

Accelerated Development

From a single click, the LaSer UK developers were able to synchronize time shifting for the entire server pool using TimeShiftX. This provided the opportunity for the developers to instantly jump to various stages of the credit life cycle, isolate and resolve defects, and rerun for validation. By leveraging TimeShiftX, the developers were able to focus only on development sprints and releases. This accelerated releases and increased productivity as developers were able to test code functionality dynamically and in real-time.

Allowed Time Travel within Active Directory

Active Directory (like Kerberos and other domain security authentication protocols) has a security restriction where a time change of 5 minutes or more kicks servers off the domain, thus blocking time travel.

By using TimeShiftX, the LaSer UK team was able to remove this roadblock as TimeShiftX allows time travel within Active Directory seamlessly. This feature enabled LaSer UK to maintain their network security and comply with company policy while time travelling.

Maintained System Reliability

LaSer UK’s dynamic architecture model paired with an Active Directory sensitive environment was initially thought of as a roadblock. But with TimeShiftX, the LaSer UK development team was able to apply time travel easily without worrying about system reliability or adding further complexities. The reason is that TimeShiftX utilizes “virtual times” that time travel only the user software application space while maintaining root system reliability. This allowed LaSer UK’s system to have their distributed components synced while preserving their data center architecture.

Increased Testing Coverage & Efficiency

LaSer UK’s credit software system had increased date dependencies such as interest rates, financial calculations, which had to adjust to every scenario. Utilizing instant time travel with TimeShiftX, LaSer UK was able to run complex date simulations to test every major, minor, and edge cases. This ability increased testing coverage as the team could run through full end-to-end cycles and time shift test every future and past stages. The secure and seamless time travel TimeShiftX provided LaSer UK allowed them to increase testing coverage and improve overall developer efficiency while meeting their release schedule.